I'm always fascinated by the capacity of the US citizen to asked to be taxed further
Really? I'm always fascinated by the capacity of the US citizen to vote for any schmuck who promises to lower taxes. Even if said schmuck is dishonest and incompetent, and explicitly says he'll only lower taxes for the upper classes, people don't care -- he's said the magic words, so they'll vote for him. The fact that the inevitable corresponding destruction of government services will actually end up costing them more in the long run than the alleged tax breaks would save them doesn't seem to register.
In my experience (UK) it's usually cheaper to drive
Assuming you already own a car, of course. If you don't, then that first trip is going to be quite pricey... (and if you do already own a car, be sure to factor in the costs of buying, insuring, fueling, and maintaining it into your calculations)
Personally I'd like to hear what "methodology" Apple uses - They seem to continually manage to release great software.
Agreed -- but I don't think it's a matter of "methodology" so much as having a really good software environment to work in. You may recall that Apple had a hell of a time getting anything major done back in the bad old days -- what was it, 8 years wasted on two or three failed efforts to update "Classic" MacOS into something decent? But now that they've successfully transferred everything over to NextStep++, they have the basics nailed and are free to concentrate on the "cool" stuff. Having a great OS with world-class APIs to code for gives their developers two advantages: (a) the underlying APIs that their code calls "just work", meaning that their new code is simpler and therefore easier to get out the door quickly, and (b) having a great coding environment attracts the really great engineers, who in turn are proud of their product and thus motivated to go the extra mile to make it even better, creating a virtuous cycle.
Have you ever thought that if the government didn't spend so much money sending troops to other countries where they are not wanted, there would be plenty of money to spend on good research such as this?
Nah, you have it backwards... if the American people weren't kept in a constant state of fear and reliance on the Pentagon to "protect" them, they wouldn't be so willing to fork over their tax dollars to support the world's largest military. That's the beauty of the system: the bigger the US military-industrial complex grows, the more the rest of the world resents and fears the USA. The more the rest of the world hates and fears the USA, the more insecure the US population becomes. The more insecure the US population becomes, the more willing they are to funnel more of their tax money into "defense", in the hopes that it will make them safer from the world that hates them so. So essentially the more money they spend, the more money they will have to spend later on.
If you beam it down, it will lose energy passing through the atmosphere.
True, but since you are getting it "for free" from the sun, a certain amount of inefficiency is tolerable. The lossage can be minimized by transmitting the power on the right frequencies.
It would also need to be very precisely targeted - at those sort of distances, a fraction of a degree off could result in blasting some poor shmucks house of the face of the earth
There are several simple ways to deal with that problem:
Add a fail-safe feedback loop to the satellite: the receiving station broadcasts a unique signal, and the power satellite only enables the power beam when it has that signal directly in its sites. That way if anything should cause the targetting system to go off course, the beam automatically shuts off.
Don't focus the beam very tightly. Instead of having a laser-like "death ray", you have the beam spread out to several square kilometers by the time it hits the Earth's surface. A metal grid can be layed out over that area to collect the energy. People wouldn't want to spend lots of time in the target area, but it wouldn't be instant death for them if they did show up there -- mild discomfort, maybe.
.... and the obvious thing: locate the receiving station in the middle of nowhere, so that even if the beam did wander miles off course somehow it wouldn't hit anything but dirt.
So the problems you mention are solvable IMHO. The real showstopper, for the moment, is getting the solar arrays into orbit: our current rockets have nowhere near the amount of lifting capacity required to make the economics practical. Possible solutions for this problem might be making the solar arrays on the moon, or (my personal favorite) the Space Elevator, which would make it practical to lift large amounts of mass to GEO.
And we'll use millions of tons of fossil fuel to put all those gigantic things up there! Brilliant!
And what would you propose we do with the last dregs of our fossil fuel reserves? Burn them up in our SUVs and wait for the rapture? Using them to construct an alternate system of collecting energy, so that civilization can continue after they are gone, seems quite reasonable to me...
If Apple could do those things it would. And same with just about any business.
That's merely a cynical assumption on your part. You might as well say "If Jeremi could rob a bank and get away with it, he would. And same with just about any Slashdotter". The truth is that some people/companies would take the low road, and others would not, and you have no way of predicting those decisions in advance.
But it is because of [Microsoft's] efforts that the industry is what it is today.
A damning indictment indeed!;^)
but if you look at their products now, things like the iPod and iTunes that give complete control to them, push DRMs down your throat, and limit choice...
When Apple removes support for the mp3 format from the iPod, when Macintoshes stop playing un-DRM'd video formats, when Apple starts going out of their way to lock your data files to their platform, so that you couldn't switch to another brand of computer even if you wanted to, when Apple starts adding secret APIs so that their own applications can gain a competitive advantage over third party apps, when Apple starts trying to crush competitors by bribing/blackmailing resellers, instead of by creating a superior product... then I will agree with you. At the moment, I don't see any of those things happening. Even in the DRM area, it seems to me that Apple is doing just the bare minimum amount of DRM work necessary to get the RIAA to play ball. The fact that they aren't heavy-handed with draconian DRM rules is no doubt a major reason why iTunes is so successful and most of the other on-line music services are not.
Apple is just as evil as Microsoft, just not as successful.
Microsoft is very successful at aggressively marketing poor quality products. Apple markets high quality products to a niche market (whether they do so successfully or not is a matter for debate).
Therefore, if we are to define "evil" as proportional to the amount of pain a company inflicts on the world through its products and practices, Microsoft wins hands down.
I think where you are going wrong is that you are attempting to define evilness by guessing at the companies' intentions -- but intentions are impossible to ever really know; you can only infer intention by looking at the companies' actions and statements, and those are always open to interpretation and thus endless, pointless debate.
I remember reading somewhere that one of the new features for SUSE 10 is reduced boot time. Can anyone confirm or deny that? For reasons I don't think are worth going into at the moment, it would be very useful to me to have a SUSE machine that can boot up quickly, say in 30 seconds or less. Can SUSE 10 do this, or be configured to do this?
button handling, and other standard chores would impinge on the proceesing ability of the CPU, requiring that the CPU be much larger and more expensive
Nah, not if it's done right. You either use a real-time OS and run the audio processing in a real-time priority thread, or just do the audio processing in an interrupt. The button handling and other stuff happen in lower priority threads, so no matter what they will never slow down audio processing. (audio processing might slow down button handling, of course, so you just have to be careful to make sure your real-time code is well-behaved)
It just seems wasteful is all.
Not at all -- what would be wasteful is putting in two chips that each spend all their lives idling or at 50% utilization (read: 50% wasted). The ideally efficient system would include exactly as much processing power as needed, and not a bit more.
If you took the time to research the facts and accepted truths that are different than your opinion, you'd know that the Fed has actually received MORE money because of the tax cuts. It's called the Laffer curve, google it.
You realize how arrogant and condescending you sound, don't you? I'm aware of the Laffer curve, and I'm also aware that it has two sides: the left side, where raising taxes increases revenue, and the right side, where raising taxes further decreases it. You seem pretty convinced that we stand on the right-hand side, but what makes you so sure of that? Increased revenues can just as easily be due to the normal economic cycle. Not to mention that it is an oversimplification: it's not just the total amount of taxation that affects GDP, but also who gets taxes and how. Some taxes will hurt the economy more than others, even if they cost their targets the same amount in dollar terms. In any case, I think it's just common sense that we shouldn't spend money we don't have -- so if the government thinks it is really important to spend more money on Iraq or whatnot, they need to raises taxes to cover that spending. If the public agrees, then the public will tolerate the extra taxes. If not, the public will elect different leaders. Hiding the costs by passing them on to future generations to pay back with interest is a lousy scam.
Our president has bombed enough arab states for the oil to be cheap
And the perverse part is that he uses the general tax funds to do the bombing, instead of raising gas taxes. So even if you don't needlessly drive a gas-guzzler, your tax dollars are subsidizing fuel-delivery costs for the people who do.
(actually, the above isn't quite true: in fact he used neither fund, but instead simply charged it to the national debt, while simultaneously lowering taxes. Try that strategy with your own credit cards some time and see where it gets you... but that's a different discussion)
If you live in the right place, wind power is close to being economical.
Actually, if you live in the midwest USA, wind power is now the cheapest option. This is a welcome development, since "use environmentally friendly energy because its cheaper" is a much easier sell than "use it because it pollutes less".
Why is it that news articles like this explain that a technically feasible and potentially beneficial technology is avilable today, but then we must wait decades before its availble to the masses?
Because the masses are cheap bastards who are unwilling to pay $75,000-$250,000 for a car that is seen as functionally equivalent to a $25,000 gasoline-powered car. When the costs/prices come down, the cars will sell, but not until then.
They just hope that if you buy into that BS, your next few car purchases will be gas burning, oil guzzling Hondas!
I think your cynicism has gone past "worldly" and on into "paranoid". Nobody chooses their car today based on what they think might be on sale five years from now. Honda has been making good progress on fuel efficiency with hybrids and they are doing good research on fuel cells, and they are rightly proud of their results. Give them a break -- not every company is out to get you.
Theres ALOT of petroleum left on Earth [...] the idea that it's "scarce" is a fiction
Sure, if you define "scarcity" in such a way that you only take into account whether or not the substance physically exists. But that's only the first criteria.
In real life, we have to take into account the costs of getting to it, and the costs of using it. Those costs include the costs of pollution, the political/military costs involved in getting access to the areas of the world involved, costs of transporting the material, and costs incurred by global warming if we burn all that fuel.
If the sum of all of the above is greater than the costs of switching to and using alternative energy sources (or greater than the costs of simply using less energy), then the wise choice would be to switch away from petroleum.
I never had an issue with manually allocating RAM to programs. I actually thought that was a feature, not a bug..
You mean you never experienced the joy of Netscape reporting incessant "out of memory" errors while there was clearly 96MB of RAM still free on your Mac? Lucky you!
And, if your only option here is to talk about MacOS 9 and previous, I think your argument isn't very strong..
Agreed -- if one can just forget that "classic" MacOS ever existed and look only at OS/X, then Apple's OS technology looks very good. Fortunately, there is almost never any need to run "classic" MacOS apps any more, so that is easy to do.
Slashdot Mirror
Really? I'm always fascinated by the capacity of the US citizen to vote for any schmuck who promises to lower taxes. Even if said schmuck is dishonest and incompetent, and explicitly says he'll only lower taxes for the upper classes, people don't care -- he's said the magic words, so they'll vote for him. The fact that the inevitable corresponding destruction of government services will actually end up costing them more in the long run than the alleged tax breaks would save them doesn't seem to register.
Or if not, you'll be dead shortly thereafter -- if the rioters don't get you, starvation will.
Have a nice day, yourself!
Assuming you already own a car, of course. If you don't, then that first trip is going to be quite pricey... (and if you do already own a car, be sure to factor in the costs of buying, insuring, fueling, and maintaining it into your calculations)
sports car, I'd be interested..
You, sir, might be interested in one of these... or perhaps even one of these. Hope you're rich.....
Agreed -- but I don't think it's a matter of "methodology" so much as having a really good software environment to work in. You may recall that Apple had a hell of a time getting anything major done back in the bad old days -- what was it, 8 years wasted on two or three failed efforts to update "Classic" MacOS into something decent? But now that they've successfully transferred everything over to NextStep++, they have the basics nailed and are free to concentrate on the "cool" stuff. Having a great OS with world-class APIs to code for gives their developers two advantages: (a) the underlying APIs that their code calls "just work", meaning that their new code is simpler and therefore easier to get out the door quickly, and (b) having a great coding environment attracts the really great engineers, who in turn are proud of their product and thus motivated to go the extra mile to make it even better, creating a virtuous cycle.
Nah, you have it backwards... if the American people weren't kept in a constant state of fear and reliance on the Pentagon to "protect" them, they wouldn't be so willing to fork over their tax dollars to support the world's largest military. That's the beauty of the system: the bigger the US military-industrial complex grows, the more the rest of the world resents and fears the USA. The more the rest of the world hates and fears the USA, the more insecure the US population becomes. The more insecure the US population becomes, the more willing they are to funnel more of their tax money into "defense", in the hopes that it will make them safer from the world that hates them so. So essentially the more money they spend, the more money they will have to spend later on.
True, but since you are getting it "for free" from the sun, a certain amount of inefficiency is tolerable. The lossage can be minimized by transmitting the power on the right frequencies.
It would also need to be very precisely targeted - at those sort of distances, a fraction of a degree off could result in blasting some poor shmucks house of the face of the earth
There are several simple ways to deal with that problem:
So the problems you mention are solvable IMHO. The real showstopper, for the moment, is getting the solar arrays into orbit: our current rockets have nowhere near the amount of lifting capacity required to make the economics practical. Possible solutions for this problem might be making the solar arrays on the moon, or (my personal favorite) the Space Elevator, which would make it practical to lift large amounts of mass to GEO.
And what would you propose we do with the last dregs of our fossil fuel reserves? Burn them up in our SUVs and wait for the rapture? Using them to construct an alternate system of collecting energy, so that civilization can continue after they are gone, seems quite reasonable to me...
That's merely a cynical assumption on your part. You might as well say "If Jeremi could rob a bank and get away with it, he would. And same with just about any Slashdotter". The truth is that some people/companies would take the low road, and others would not, and you have no way of predicting those decisions in advance.
A damning indictment indeed!
but if you look at their products now, things like the iPod and iTunes that give complete control to them, push DRMs down your throat, and limit choice...
When Apple removes support for the mp3 format from the iPod, when Macintoshes stop playing un-DRM'd video formats, when Apple starts going out of their way to lock your data files to their platform, so that you couldn't switch to another brand of computer even if you wanted to, when Apple starts adding secret APIs so that their own applications can gain a competitive advantage over third party apps, when Apple starts trying to crush competitors by bribing/blackmailing resellers, instead of by creating a superior product... then I will agree with you. At the moment, I don't see any of those things happening. Even in the DRM area, it seems to me that Apple is doing just the bare minimum amount of DRM work necessary to get the RIAA to play ball. The fact that they aren't heavy-handed with draconian DRM rules is no doubt a major reason why iTunes is so successful and most of the other on-line music services are not.
Microsoft is very successful at aggressively marketing poor quality products. Apple markets high quality products to a niche market (whether they do so successfully or not is a matter for debate).
Therefore, if we are to define "evil" as proportional to the amount of pain a company inflicts on the world through its products and practices, Microsoft wins hands down.
I think where you are going wrong is that you are attempting to define evilness by guessing at the companies' intentions -- but intentions are impossible to ever really know; you can only infer intention by looking at the companies' actions and statements, and those are always open to interpretation and thus endless, pointless debate.
According to the dictionary, fishes is an acceptable plural of fish also. If you're going to be pedantic, rule #1 is to be correct
I remember reading somewhere that one of the new features for SUSE 10 is reduced boot time. Can anyone confirm or deny that? For reasons I don't think are worth going into at the moment, it would be very useful to me to have a SUSE machine that can boot up quickly, say in 30 seconds or less. Can SUSE 10 do this, or be configured to do this?
Nah, not if it's done right. You either use a real-time OS and run the audio processing in a real-time priority thread, or just do the audio processing in an interrupt. The button handling and other stuff happen in lower priority threads, so no matter what they will never slow down audio processing. (audio processing might slow down button handling, of course, so you just have to be careful to make sure your real-time code is well-behaved)
It just seems wasteful is all.
Not at all -- what would be wasteful is putting in two chips that each spend all their lives idling or at 50% utilization (read: 50% wasted). The ideally efficient system would include exactly as much processing power as needed, and not a bit more.
You realize how arrogant and condescending you sound, don't you? I'm aware of the Laffer curve, and I'm also aware that it has two sides: the left side, where raising taxes increases revenue, and the right side, where raising taxes further decreases it. You seem pretty convinced that we stand on the right-hand side, but what makes you so sure of that? Increased revenues can just as easily be due to the normal economic cycle. Not to mention that it is an oversimplification: it's not just the total amount of taxation that affects GDP, but also who gets taxes and how. Some taxes will hurt the economy more than others, even if they cost their targets the same amount in dollar terms. In any case, I think it's just common sense that we shouldn't spend money we don't have -- so if the government thinks it is really important to spend more money on Iraq or whatnot, they need to raises taxes to cover that spending. If the public agrees, then the public will tolerate the extra taxes. If not, the public will elect different leaders. Hiding the costs by passing them on to future generations to pay back with interest is a lousy scam.
Of course, on most (non-congested) highways 65 mp/h is considered the lower bound, not the upper...
And the perverse part is that he uses the general tax funds to do the bombing, instead of raising gas taxes. So even if you don't needlessly drive a gas-guzzler, your tax dollars are subsidizing fuel-delivery costs for the people who do.
(actually, the above isn't quite true: in fact he used neither fund, but instead simply charged it to the national debt, while simultaneously lowering taxes. Try that strategy with your own credit cards some time and see where it gets you... but that's a different discussion)
So, does the Pope love Darl? I, um --- (head explodes)
You're in luck -- with an Honda, there's no need to buy a more powerful car. Instead, just add decals until it's fast enough.
Actually, if you live in the midwest USA, wind power is now the cheapest option. This is a welcome development, since "use environmentally friendly energy because its cheaper" is a much easier sell than "use it because it pollutes less".
Because the masses are cheap bastards who are unwilling to pay $75,000-$250,000 for a car that is seen as functionally equivalent to a $25,000 gasoline-powered car. When the costs/prices come down, the cars will sell, but not until then.
They just hope that if you buy into that BS, your next few car purchases will be gas burning, oil guzzling Hondas!
I think your cynicism has gone past "worldly" and on into "paranoid". Nobody chooses their car today based on what they think might be on sale five years from now. Honda has been making good progress on fuel efficiency with hybrids and they are doing good research on fuel cells, and they are rightly proud of their results. Give them a break -- not every company is out to get you.
Sure, if you define "scarcity" in such a way that you only take into account whether or not the substance physically exists. But that's only the first criteria.
In real life, we have to take into account the costs of getting to it, and the costs of using it. Those costs include the costs of pollution, the political/military costs involved in getting access to the areas of the world involved, costs of transporting the material, and costs incurred by global warming if we burn all that fuel.
If the sum of all of the above is greater than the costs of switching to and using alternative energy sources (or greater than the costs of simply using less energy), then the wise choice would be to switch away from petroleum.
When the fossil fuel reserves run out, it will still be possible to produce hydrogen. I don't think the same thing can be said for gasoline.
Am I wrong, or did they get Ms. Portman to pose with the new laptop?
You mean you never experienced the joy of Netscape reporting incessant "out of memory" errors while there was clearly 96MB of RAM still free on your Mac? Lucky you!
And, if your only option here is to talk about MacOS 9 and previous, I think your argument isn't very strong..
Agreed -- if one can just forget that "classic" MacOS ever existed and look only at OS/X, then Apple's OS technology looks very good. Fortunately, there is almost never any need to run "classic" MacOS apps any more, so that is easy to do.